Tag: Studio

New year, new clothes. The AW13 collections are earlier than ever this season, as the second London Collections: Men kicks off today ahead of Pitti, Milan and Paris, following the success of the capital's AW12 standalone schedule. As designers put the finishing touches to their collections; carry out castings, fittings and hair tests, we go on a series of studio visits to get a feel of what to expect. Our final behind-the-scenes peek is Richard Nicoll, who makes immaculately balancedclassicist designs from his work-space on east London's Kingsland Road.

Dazed Digital: What was the biggest challenge in putting the collection together?
Richard Nicoll:Christmas.

DD: Favourite advice you've had from someone?
Richard Nicoll:
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

DD: Any tips for staying calm during fashion week?

Richard Nicoll:Xanax.

DD: ...Or staying awake when there's so much work to do?

Richard Nicoll:Strong Coffee.

DD: What were the first pieces in the collection you designed?

Richard Nicoll:The parkas and the leather pieces.

DD: What are you most proud of?
Richard Nicoll:I'm really proud of the collection as a whole and proud of my team for making it happen.


DD: What other shows are you looking forward to seeing?
Richard Nicoll:
I'm actually looking forward to seeing it all.

DD: Who embodies the spirit of your collection?

Richard Nicoll:David Byrne.


DD: Sum up AW13 in three words…

Richard Nicoll:No-Wave, Industrial and Classical.

DD: What difference does fashion make?
Richard Nicoll:It makes none in the grand scheme of things but being able to dream is important.

Trying to pin down Werner Herzog's career is an impossible task. Since his turbulent early years making the likes of Fitzcarraldo (1982) – shot in the Peruvian jungle with muse Klaus Kinski – he's mastered myriad cinematic forms, from a documentary in the Antarctic (Encounters at the Edge of the World, 2007) to thriller Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, in which Nicolas Cage starred as a maniacal, crack-smoking cop. Today most people know the 70-year-old, Munich-born auteur as the critically acclaimed documentary maker of films like Grizzly Man (2005), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) and Into the Abyss (2011).

Fewer know him for his acting, but since 1998 he's been popping up in the unlikeliest English-language movies, from 2008 poker mockumentary The Grand to a short film the following years as the voice of a plastic bag. But it's his role as The Zec, the unflappable criminal overlord up against Tom Cruise in mystery thriller Jack Reacher that's going to have you squirming in your seat. Herzog used his deadpan turn of phrase to tell us why he's so good at being bad.

You're very scary as Russian capo The Zec.

That was the point. The only point.

Did you have any inspiration for the character?

No, it's all standardisations of course. Russians are very sweet people, very deep, very different than you would imagine. I know what I'm talking about because I’m married to a Russian woman from Siberia.

Tell us about The Zec's signature scene – he tells an underling to chew off his own fingers...

That scene was longer. I was very quiet and just kept encouraging (the victim) and the studio got scared. They wanted PG-13, which means no sex, no physical violence, no swearing, no blasphemy. And I'm very quietly inviting him to eat his fingers off – it was so scary the studio wanted to cut it down. (Writer/director) Chris McQuarrie cut it down and still the studio was scared about it. So we used a third, even more cut-down version and they're still scared.

If you find it scary then everything is good.

How did you get into the character of The Zec?

I could literally step from this table and if there were a camera and actors ready, I would step into it and I would be scary.

As such an esteemed filmmaker yourself, is it tempting to tell everybody what to do?

No, I wouldn't interfere at all. Absolutely not. And I have no problems following direction. There was one tiny, tiny moment where I made a remark that was picked up, but I shouldn't even have said it.

Did Tom Cruise apologise for pointing a gun in your face?

No, that was part of the deal. We are in movies.

Did you know he's a big fan of yours?

I didn't know that. He's very respectful and apparently has seen some of my films. But he's seen some acting of mine and he apparently wanted to have me as a real badass, a really bad and dangerous character. They have much larger parts for bad guys but they have weapons, and they needed somebody who looked dangerous before he even spoke.

What's changed in the business, for better or worse?

Changes are coming. I see it and I don't want to grow old about certain things. Two nights ago I did live streaming of a rock concert (by The Killers) over the internet. Eighteen cameras, no post-production. So I set the visual styling, and we had internet connectivity so the audience could participate and send in photos, which was part of the show. I'm always curious about what's coming at me. Of course there have been huge changes in the last 45–50 years of cinema: great innovations like digital effects, although I do not use them. There's phenomenal possibility out there. Audiences have changed, drastically.

But a good story is still a good story.

Of course, and that's going to outlive anything. Whatever is coming at us in forms of digital effects and franchised moviemaking, the long-range survival is great storytelling. That's what's good about Jack Reacher.

Is acting just for fun or does it give you a different perspective on directing?

The answer is very simple: I love everything that has to do with cinema. I like writing a screenplay, directing, editing and producing, I just love it all. I do what comes at me swinging most wildly and then I deal with it. I've never had a career because I've never planned step one, step two. It's all come at me like burglars in the night. And you're there in your kitchen and you hear the noise and if one of them comes at you swinging more wildly you have to deal with that one first.

Is that how you've come across most of your projects?

Take Grizzly Man. I swear to God I was not looking for a film. I'd been in the office of a producer who had been very friendly to me and I paid him a courtesy visit and after ten minutes I got up to leave and reached in my pocket, and there were lots of papers and half-eaten lunch salad and I realised my car keys were not in my pocket, they were somewhere on the desk. We were looking for my car keys and he spots something and pushes it to me and says, 'Read this, we're planning a very interesting film.' So I read it and ten minutes later I went straight back and asked about the status of the film, who was directing it. The producer, who is also a director, said, 'I'm kind of directing it,' and I knew then and there he wasn't completely sure. So I stretched my hand to him and said, 'I will direct it,' and I was in business. I was not looking for a film – I was looking for my car keys.

Are you a journalist at heart?

No, I am a poet. If you look at Into the Abyss, I wanted to interview a man on death row, and the authorities had no objection because I came without a catalogue of questions. I wanted a discourse with this person who was going to be executed eight days later and had no idea what I was going to say to him.

Were there any similarities between working with Klaus Kinski and Tom Cruise?

Kinski was an extraordinary professional and so is Tom Cruise. Of course there was some other problems with Kinski but bottom-line, he was a phenomenal professional, and it's always very easy to work with great professionals. Tom Cruise has an enormous intensity.

Would you like to direct a film with Tom Cruise?

I would need a real good story, one that would fit. I wouldn't randomly have him in a film where he wouldn't be the right one.

Your work has primarily been in documentaries lately. Do you have a passion for telling the truth?

No, it's just that in the last ten years I've made more documentaries. I've also made five feature films in the last ten years and that's easily overlooked because some of my recent documentaries were very successful, and all of a sudden people think you make documentaries. I just make movies.

You're working almost constantly. Are you a workaholic?

That word couldn't be more wrong, because I work very calmly and quietly. For example, on Bad Lieutenant my days of shooting were normally over by 2pm or 3pm, not a single hour over time. I brought the film in two days under schedule and $2.6 million under budget, which is unheard of in Hollywood. Now the producer wants to marry me.

My team got nervous, asking, 'What about the coverage?' I had to ask my assistant what the term meant. Is it something to do with insurance? No, no, no, they said, shoot from this angle here and that angle there. I said no, I've shot everything I need for the screen. At one point Nicholas Cage said, 'Silence everyone for a moment.' Everybody falls silent and he says, 'Finally, somebody who knows what he’s doing.’

So what do you think of someone like David Fincher who does 60, 70 takes?

Who is this?

Zodiac, Fight Club, Se7en, The Social Network…

I haven't seen any of his films. I do not know who he is. But let him do it if the result is good.

The latest release from the Software Studios imprint is 'Instrumental Tourist', the collaborative LP of Brooklyn-based Oneohtrix Point Never and the Polaris Award-winning Tim Hecker, whose respective experiments have routinely teased at the boundaries of electronic music and the capacity for compositions to grow from decidedly non or anti-formalist beginnings. After being long-time fans of each others solo work, 'Instrumental Tourist' sees Hecker and Lopatin come together to not only explore the capacity for their music to find a common ground in a collaborative project and to push one another in the studio setting, but also to probe at the potential for ambient and drone music to delve deeper into new, unfamiliar sonic realms.

DazedDigital: What inspired you to work on a collaborative album together?

Oneohtrix Point Never:I approached Tim about collaborating with me for a series of 12"s that C. Spencer Yeh and I wanted to release on Software - bringing together electronic music producers working in a more or less improvisatory manner in the studio. The idea was partially inspired by my interest in Teo Macero and his sessions with Miles Davis' varying groups in the late '60s and early '70s. There is a dynamic between open ended jams and the logic of tape editing that I find really stimulating. I thought that Tim and I would be great in terms of both utilizing the studio as an instrument, but I also just had a hunch that we'd compliment each other well; like in a rhythm section, or the ways directors and DPs work together. Contrasting styles and struggles can often lead to fresh work and having admired Tim's solo stuff, I thought it was worth a shot.

Tim Hecker:I was deeply into Daniel's last recordReplicawhen he suggested the project. I thought it made sense on a bunch of levels. Instead of doing a collaboration which brings together the 'inert' digital composer with a 'lively' or 'physical' instrumentalist to spray fresh life on the mouse clicking tedium, I thought some other route was better and this project made sense. Anyways, the point of a collaborative effort shouldn't be visualizing a clear path in advance. I wasn't sure how it would work out, and was interested in how it might take shape - which was part of the pleasure.

DD: Your LPs are stylized regarding around "digital garbage", and the ambiguous evocations of drone and ambient music. How do you feel your respective aesthetics married on the LP?

Oneohtrix Point Never:I think we both do a fair amount of melodic manipulation. There are some procedural things we do with garbage that lead to sounds suggesting classical forms, and upon discovering some of the specifics oh how that works respectively, we were able to work out a shared language.

Tim Hecker:From way too high of a vantage point it could be argued that we occupy similar terrain of music, but I think we both agree there's significant variance in terms of our interests and approaches in composing sound. I honestly wasn't interested in 'marrying' our aesthetics in a kind of linear additive sense, but rather evaporating the self into a project that is more than just you.

DD: Did you begin the project with a particular conceptual direction in mind as a duo?

Oneohtrix Point Never:I'm not sure how it emerged, but we pretty quickly got into this idea that we could paint an extended portrait of a sonic world that is filled with stock musical motifs and sounds in there most vulnerable states. Like the subconscious fears and desires of azither- what might that look like? There was a lot of conversation like that. But what you're hearing are very loose portrayals of that idea. It's more an anchor to stimulate, but then we really do end up just jamming off of each other in a way that isn't conceptually didactic.

Tim Hecker:We didn't cut a path in advance. It sort of took shape very quickly in a non-contrived, almost unconscious level through joking around and talking in the studio. It may not seem apparent from the music but our studio time was filled with laughs and rapid-fire banter that kind of helped to morph the approach as things continued over a couple of days.

DD: Technically, how did you approach the recording process? You're both known to process samples of acoustic instruments and analogue synths in your productions, so how did you work out enough of a variation between the two of you to feel you had technically distinct inputs into the sound of the project?

Tim Hecker:I didn't care for delineating any sort of distinct input. I enjoy dissolving myself into an ether of Daniel's solo lines. For example, mixing or adding reverb to one of Daniel's phrases for me constitutes creative input that is better than being sonically represented in an obvious way. I'm still obsessed with the effect of electronic instruments being re-amplified in real space and capturing those environments. We used a lot of room microphones that gave a greater depth to things.

DD: The album is presented as largely improvisational, with a sort of free-jazz spirit to it. How do you feel you worked towards more structured elements over a prolonged period of time with this ethos in mind?

Oneohtrix Point Never:It's less about free-jazz and more about an open, improvisatory approach and deep listening. You can easily link that to all sorts of 20th century musical practices. There's no need to compromise because there's no hardcore parameters set until we're dealing with edits or having some macro level discussion about which tunes work and which don't. There's formal aspects to both of our styles but I wouldn't say there is a formal aspect to this project. We usually agree on what sounds good, and when we don't its easy - we just ice it and move forward.